I've been using red for port, green for starboard, white for ventral and dorsal ever since I started making stuff.

@PyreStarite: Idk the exact numbers but from staring at planes in the night sky, I use a 1-1.5 sec blink interval with around 10-20% blink length.

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If we're going more off aircraft, the red and green should be constant-on, with the red visible from dead ahead to just abaft the port beam and green visible from dead ahead to just abaft the starboard beam. White anti-collision strobes go on the wingtips (aft of the colored lights) and on the dorsal/ventral sides. The space standards posted in OP replace the ventral white strobes with yellow ones so that top/bottom can be better distinguished, but it also says that all lights should flash.

Personally, I usually only use a ventral strobe near the tail, and only on my SSGLs. Everything else just gets red/green. Too many flashing lights is visually irritating.

When it comes to position lights in Space it is only good to show the orientation of the space craft. As space crafts can be travelling in another direction than the nose is pointing it would be fatal to rely on the lights for moving direction. Also consider to have two lights that flash in different Intervalls to make them discernable from natural rotating objects.

For Planes and Ships it is also important for the right of way, i.e. which vessel has to change course to avoid collision. Planes and Boats usually always move "Forward" with only slight drift. And while ships can move backwards, I never saw a plane doing that (on purpose). In space however you can travel in one direction and facing in another. And without points of reference it's also difficult to say in which direction on which speed a space ship is travelling. There a good radar system would be handy.

I actually use something similar. But I use the beacon as the "yellow" light on the bottom and I have the two white lights strobe at different intervals so the ship doesn't look like a star from far away.

I imagine it's useful when docking where the ship is at relatively low speed and orientation is important. IRL, spacecraft travel so fast that you wouldn't see the navigational lights until you were about to crash into it.

For Planes and Ships it is also important for the right of way, i.e. which vessel has to change course to avoid collision. Planes and Boats usually always move "Forward" with only slight drift. And while ships can move backwards, I never saw a plane doing that (on purpose). In space however you can travel in one direction and facing in another. And without points of reference it's also difficult to say in which direction on which speed a space ship is travelling. There a good radar system would be handy.

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I stumbled across this thread only because the last post was fairly recent. Position lights are not really intended to tell other pilots (ship or plane, or even spacecraft) which way you ship/craft is going. If we forget about aircraft for a second, the idea of position lights was devised for watercraft, which may or may not be moving, and may or may not be moving in the direction they are pointed. Therefore, position lights can only reliably tell you which way the craft you're looking at is pointed. You need some other method to determine what direction and at what speed the craft is actually moving, if it is indeed moving at all.

Collision lights became a thing for aircraft, i believe, back in the late 60's when there was a boom in private aircraft activity. It became clear that at aircraft speeds it was not enough to simply know which way an aircraft was pointed. You needed to be able to see it long before you could tell the difference between a green light and a red one. The white flash is difficult to ignore, can be seen from a great distance, and the regular strobe can help determine relative speed and direction.